Nintendo: The Non-Competitive Brand

It is hard now-a-days to grasp Nintendo’s motives behind of their recent decisions. So far in 2013 they have spoke out against Lets Play videos, only to change their mind and allow them. Then the petitions started rolling out to get the Wii U’s region lock taken away, and even with outstanding numbers those petitions were shot down. Now Nintendo has forbidden the streaming of SSB.s Melee on EVO.Before going any further let me assure readers that I am a Nintendo gamer first and foremost with PC coming in a 2nd. Now that that is out of the way it is time for a well deserved “WTF!” moment. The Big N has made it painfully obvious already that they are not are not competing against Microsoft and Sony in this Next-Gen era, and honestly they haven’t been competing since the Wii. I’m unsure if it is company ego, or losing of touch, or worse a combination of the two. But the fact is Nintendo is not a competitive brand anymore. I remember when Sega came out with their anti-Nintendo slogans and Nintendo didn’t take them sitting down. In fact they fired back to show that the industry was theirs, and for good reason. That spirit is gone.
(Industry, Nintendo)

Nintendo is worse than MS when it comes to listening to their fans. How long have we asked for a Mario game like Mario 64 and a Zelda game. Those 2 brands would have been system sellers. And they should have been released with the WiiU.

I just wrote an essay in response to somebody's fanboyish remark on this website on why I hate Nintendo. You're right. The fanboys are the problem, they support Nintendo which makes NT think they're fine thus giving them no reason to push big games. I can't even think of any decent U exclusives right now, come Fall 2013 the U is going to get flattened. I'm sorry, but it's true and that is my opinion.

Nintendo had always had an ego that was too big for them. And it has always caused problems for them; - 3rd parties' five games per year limit for the NES. - 3rd parties' limited take on what cartridge size they're going to get. Nintendo was biased toward some companies over others; some companies had to make do with what limited cartridge memories that were allocated to them. Meaning, game design faced many troubles, and alot of compromises had to be made. Some games had to be shipped with bugs because there wasn't enough memory to fix them. Of course, Nintendo always had the number one priority in memory allocation, which meant they saw themselves to be much more important than their 3rd party contributors. (In fact, they still see themselves to be more important than 3rd party developers. Hmm.) - 3rd party developers had to develop all their games exclusively for Nintendo platforms, otherwise they lose their licence and can't develop anything at all. - Nintendo had the right to adjust any content they see fit in their 3rd party developers' games, otherwise 3rd party developers have no right to develop and publish games for Nintendo's platforms. When Mortal Kombat was being released for consoles, Nintendo demanded that its contents be heavily modified, or it will see no release on the console. Developers and Nintendo's fans both were angered by such a decision, causing alot of their fans to move from the SNES to the Genesis. Sega's market share increased to 52% and they became the market leader for that generation ever since. - When the Virtual Boy failed to sell well, Nintendo ill treated it's creator, Gunpei Yokoi, even though he practically made the company. This led to his departure, and Nintendo just let him go. - When Nintendo made a deal with Sony for a CD add-on for the SNES, Nintendo decided to backstab Sony. Just after Sony announced their plans for Nintendo's CD add-on at CES, Nintendo went ahead and announced that they're making a deal with Philips instead, without prior knowledge from Sony. Sony was awestruck, and decided to teach Nintendo a lesson that led to where both companies are today, with Sony on top and Nintendo either a distant second or distant third behind. - When the industry was moving toward CDs for their very large capacity and very low price, Nintendo, who couldn't strike a deal to make a CD drive, thought it wasn't that important, even though all 3rd party developers wanted to work with a CD based platform and showed preference for the PlayStation. Instead Nintendo stated that "players will flock to buy an Ultra 64 because players always want the best system on the market, and then developers will have to line up to make games for the system." As it turned out, PlayStation was the best system on the market, and Nintendo's market share dropped to a record low 33% and started going down from there. - Nintendo stated that "they don't need 3rd party developers for the Wii U" and that non-gamers will be interested in it as much as they were for the the Wii. But non-gamers' interest has run dry, and Nintendo's immortal blind fans were way too few to support the system. - Nintendo didn't see it necessary to make a system with specs on par with the competition, even though they have loads of cash, nor saw it necessary to compete in the first place, because players always want the best system on the market, and the the Wii U is supposedly the best system on the market. But we all know what happened.

So yeah, Nintendo is a very nice, good-loving company. I'm sure Nintendo's fans will love this list of facts and hit the 'dislike' button as fast as they can because that's what they always do.

Thanks for the history lesson FinalFantasyFan! U are apsolutely right up until the part where you said sega genesis had a higher marketing share over the snes.thats just not true.it was a neck to neck bloody battle but the snes came out on top bcause it had better and more games despite both systems being great.

Nintendo needs to stop bsing and get back into competing with good hardware and games.

Thanks for the comment. As for Sega's market share increase, I did not come up with that myself. This is only one of market share rate increases, as there's been several ups and downs. What's important though, is that according to an NPD study: "the Sega Genesis was able to maintain its lead over the Super NES in the American 16-bit console market." Which means that when the 16-bit era came to a close, Sega was on top, even with their failed consoles the Sega CD, 32X, etc.

Unfortunately, most, if not all, Nintendo fans believe that Nintendo is a benevolent company, when the truth is that it's far from it.